Between Triumph and Tragedy: The Use and Misuse of Hebrew in Germany from Mendelssohn to Eichmann

Hebrew was never a language spoken much in modern Germany. But the variety of its uses over the last two centuries reflect the diverse experiences of Jewish life in Germany. The maskilim attempted—without much success—to revive Hebrew and launched a few journals for this purpose. Protestant missionaries used the language in their fight over Jewish souls. During the 1920s, Berlin hosted a thriving colony of Hebrew writers from Eastern Europe with their own publishing houses and journals, while Shmuel Yosef Agnon lived and wrote in the small town of Bad Homburg until his house there burnt down in 1924. One of the most tragic chapters in the use of the Hebrew language began when Nazi officials acquired the language in order to control the Jewish population. In some instances, it served even as an instrument in the extermination process of the Jews. Adolf Eichmann only acquired skills to read the Hebrew alphabet in order to understand the Yiddish press, but lower-ranking Nazis were able to deceive the East European Jews by their decent knowledge of Hebrew. The article closes with a brief epilogue on the use of German in the State of Israel, ending with Günther Grass’s speech in German during his 1967 Israel visit.